Murder mystery 101
I had a writing epiphany today. 
frith_in_thorns says I should share with the class. :D
Basically, it's this:
For the last couple of months, I've been writing a murder mystery -- a steampunk romance murder mystery set in 1930, to be precise. A couple of weeks ago, some 50K into the thing, I got supremely stuck, so stuck that all of my usual unsticking techniques have not been working at all.
By this point I've written 5 novels in addition to a number of novel-length fanfics, which means I actually have a skill set for unsticking big plots! Believe me, no one is more shocked by this than I am! Usually it's a matter of going back to the beginning and carefully re-outlining everything I've written so far, looking for weak spots and potential points of divergence along the way. Sometimes I write plot points on index cards or post-its and lay them all out on a table. Sometimes I re-enact scenes with toys. When worst comes to worst, I just MAKE A DECISION ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT and go with that -- in my head, I call it the "dancing ninja conga line" because if you imagine a line of dancing ninjas conga-ing through your scene, anything has got to be an improvement over that.
But none of that was working on this one. Even making arbitrary decisions about the next plot point wasn't helping, because I'd just grind to a halt immediately on the next plot point.
But today I figured it out.
Basically, in nearly every sort of fiction, the main characters are the ones that drive the plot. Every important thing that happens, happens to them, and they have at least some agency in it.
In a murder mystery, though, that's exactly reversed. The detective-protagonists do have their own emotional/personal lives going on (ideally) in which they are principal actors, but the main driving force of the plot are actually the killers/victims/suspects.
Which means you have to outline the book from the point of view of the non-primary characters.
And once I realized that, things started falling into place beautifully, because that's why I've been having so much trouble figuring out what happens to my detectives at each stage of the plot; I'm viewing the whole world through their eyes, when actually, their actions and motivations are not the ones driving the big picture.
I think, looking back on it, that this is actually a recurring problem in a lot of my fiction -- original fiction much more so than fanfic, because in fanfic the minor characters are already pretty well known, but in original fiction it's easy to let the background collapse into two dimensions. And now I'm wondering how many of my other troublesome plots could be resolved by doing what I'm currently doing: outlining the movements and motivations of ALL of the characters, not just the ones at the center of the action.
Well, I wanted to write a murder mystery to learn to plot. Today I have learned something, for sure.
This entry is also posted at http://sholio.dreamwidth.org/950906.html with
comments.
frith_in_thorns says I should share with the class. :D
Basically, it's this:
For the last couple of months, I've been writing a murder mystery -- a steampunk romance murder mystery set in 1930, to be precise. A couple of weeks ago, some 50K into the thing, I got supremely stuck, so stuck that all of my usual unsticking techniques have not been working at all.
By this point I've written 5 novels in addition to a number of novel-length fanfics, which means I actually have a skill set for unsticking big plots! Believe me, no one is more shocked by this than I am! Usually it's a matter of going back to the beginning and carefully re-outlining everything I've written so far, looking for weak spots and potential points of divergence along the way. Sometimes I write plot points on index cards or post-its and lay them all out on a table. Sometimes I re-enact scenes with toys. When worst comes to worst, I just MAKE A DECISION ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT and go with that -- in my head, I call it the "dancing ninja conga line" because if you imagine a line of dancing ninjas conga-ing through your scene, anything has got to be an improvement over that.
But none of that was working on this one. Even making arbitrary decisions about the next plot point wasn't helping, because I'd just grind to a halt immediately on the next plot point.
But today I figured it out.
Basically, in nearly every sort of fiction, the main characters are the ones that drive the plot. Every important thing that happens, happens to them, and they have at least some agency in it.
In a murder mystery, though, that's exactly reversed. The detective-protagonists do have their own emotional/personal lives going on (ideally) in which they are principal actors, but the main driving force of the plot are actually the killers/victims/suspects.
Which means you have to outline the book from the point of view of the non-primary characters.
And once I realized that, things started falling into place beautifully, because that's why I've been having so much trouble figuring out what happens to my detectives at each stage of the plot; I'm viewing the whole world through their eyes, when actually, their actions and motivations are not the ones driving the big picture.
I think, looking back on it, that this is actually a recurring problem in a lot of my fiction -- original fiction much more so than fanfic, because in fanfic the minor characters are already pretty well known, but in original fiction it's easy to let the background collapse into two dimensions. And now I'm wondering how many of my other troublesome plots could be resolved by doing what I'm currently doing: outlining the movements and motivations of ALL of the characters, not just the ones at the center of the action.
Well, I wanted to write a murder mystery to learn to plot. Today I have learned something, for sure.
This entry is also posted at http://sholio.dreamwidth.org/950906.html with
comments.